Assessing Auditors' Mindfulness Violation Functions based on Cognitive Bias

Perceptual bias is a deviation from facts in decision-making or judgment that negatively affects individual actions. In the auditing profession, this issue is created by the auditor's fascination with a feature or characteristic of the performance of the company or the client and causes the professional judgment based on mindfulness to deviate from reality. The Purpose of this research is assessing auditors' mindfulness violation functions based on cognitive bias. Research methodology is developmental and mixed. In the qualitative part, based on the Meta-synthesis analysis, first an attempt was made to identify the components as the analytical basis of the research and the propositions as the reference variables. Then, based on Delphi analysis, the theoretical consensus was examined to finally determine the most effective violations of auditors' mindfulness functions based on cognitive biased distortions in order to explain the identified components and themes in the quantitative part of the research. In this study, the target population consisted of two parts: qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative part, with the help of 15 accounting experts at the university level, an attempt was made to identify the research components, components and propositions in the form of scoring forms. In the quantitative part, 19 auditing partners with more than 4 years of work experience were used to participate in the research. The results showed that distortion of halo bias is the most effective factor for violating the mindset of auditors. In fact, the result of this study reflects the fact that the existence of halo bias distortion, surroundings and control of the auditor over having a detailed approach to reviewing the evidence of owners due to the auditor's transparency on one dimension of the audit work or the characteristics of the owners or even the position of the owners in the competitive market due to having more market share, can affect the level of analytical arguments of auditors.